Ben Gray Lumpkin Digital Audio Project

The Ben Gray Lumpkin Digital Audio Project began with submission of a proposal to the Collaborative Digitization Program (CDP) for their Sound Model Grant. This grant was primarily to digitize oral history tapes but we submitted a proposal to digitize Colorado field recordings of folk music.

The songs for this project were selected by William Kearns, Professor Emeritus of the University of Colorado College of Music and a volunteer in the American Music Research Center (AMRC). Professor Kearns was the original curator of the Ben Gray Lumpkin Collection when it was gifted to the AMRC. He also assisted with describing the various types of folk songs and early popular music.

Because of the special nature of the materials in our project, we received permission from CDP to use a local vendor for the digitization of the audio. We were given matching funds from the University Libraries to enable us to use Air Show Mastering as our digitization provider. Air Show used the following procedures to digitize our audio from the original reel-to-reel tapes:

The reel-to-reel tapes were played on a Studer 820 tape machine through a Muth (custom hand made) Analog Transfer Console. The analog signal was converted to digital using a Prism AD-2 analog to digital convertor. The digital signal was recorded using Nuendo 2.0 software at 96K/24bit as a Broadcast Wave file via a Lynx 2 with a LS/AES interface card.

After receiving the hard drive with the digital audio from Air Show, Ross Hagen, a doctoral student in the College of Music, used ProTools to edit and track the music.